As the title already highlights, it is essential to have transparency in display advertising. It is important to know where your campaign has been displayed, how much fraud was there, how it performed, and what ROI you got. The whole process from programmatic buying to performance measurement needs to be clear. If you have transparent data, you can better understand if your campaign and its message were successful and relevant for the target audience and where you need to improve.
Why are we talking about that? Because, unfortunately, getting clear data is not always easy. Over the last 20 years, the industry became so corrupted and overloaded with numerous value chain stakeholders that simply make most of their revenue with fraud and are not interested in displaying real data. For this reason, many advertisers shifted to in-house programmatic building their own tech stack or using SaaS platforms like Adello.Direct.
So, the biggest problem is ad fraud, like click farms, where you have people who are paid to click on your ad, bots, which can perform a human behavior online, or pixel stuffing when your ad is put into a single pixel, so impossible to see for the human eye etc. There are publishers, media agencies, SSPs, ad exchanges, ad networks, even fraud prevention agencies, you name it, who are not interested in disclosing their data.
We had an exclusive interview with Dr. Augustine Fou, Forbes’ contributor researching ad fraud and digital marketing, published on our magazine AD.INSIDER. When choosing a fraud prevention partner, he suggested asking the following two questions:
“1) do they have different tags for in-ad versus on-site measurement? 2) do they measure for humans, in addition to measure for bots/IVT? If both of the answers are no, then they are missing a lot, and their measurements are not going to be accurate.”
Dr. Augustine Fou on AD.INSIDER
In one recent Dr. Augustine Fou’s article on Forbes, he again highlights how important it is to buy inventory directly with good publishers to avoid ad fraud.
This might sound a little bit frightening, but there is no need to worry. When choosing an agency or programmatic platform, you have to assess their transparency, attitude towards clients, and measures to detect and prevent fraud. In other words, make sure they have transparent spending of your budget, an ad fraud control system in place, and can provide the data you need about your campaign, from the setup to the final report.
Solutions like that will also let you also spare money (up to 20% with Adello.Direct) since you do not pay for ads that no one sees. Digital marketing and especially mobile advertising are great tools to reach out to the right audience thanks to their varied targeting and personalization options.
To sum up and answer the question “why transparency is essential in display advertising”, choosing a transparent agency or solution to run your programmatic in-house will let you spend your money for actual impressions and clicks, work with a competent team that keeps your ad safe from fraud, and take the control over your ad campaign.
Curious to know more about the transparency of Adello Direct? Contact us and try out the demo for free on Adello.Direct 😊
